John Carpenter: ‘They Live is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie’
Photograph: Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Pity the poor artists whose work is wrested away from them and used to nefarious, often political, ends. It’s one thing to talk about the death of the author, quite another to hear that hit song you wrote used as intro-music at campaign rallies for a politician you despise. Then there’s that awkward moment when your work is feted and celebrated for all the wrong reasons by exactly the wrong kind of audience.

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That happened to director John Carpenter when neo-Nazis and antisemites took to claiming on white power websites that Carpenter’s campily paranoid 1988 sci-fi action flick They Live, was an allegory for “Jewish control of the world”. This meme has been floating around the stagnant white-supremacist backwaters of the internet since about 2008, disappearing and then resurfacing as dependably as herpes ever since.

Carpenter tweeted in words he probably never imagined himself having to use: “THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.”

In the movie, a nameless, homeless protagonist (played by Canadian pro-wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) stumbles into a worldwide conspiracy when he finds a pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the world as it really is. Advertising billboards for conventional products now reveal their subliminal subtexts: OBEY and SUBMIT and CONSUME. MARRY AND REPRODUCE. NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT. Further, he can now see that about one in 10 of the people around him are ferociously ugly and scary robotic creatures with bacon-like skin and bulbous eyes. They’re an alien race, it turns out, in the process of enslaving the Earth, mainly through the use of television, and exploiting its inhabitants until nothing remains. Then they’ll move on to their next target planet. “We are their cattle … We are being bred for slavery,” says one member of the underground resistance (mostly people living off the grid, and thus unsusceptible to media brainwashing). “We’re like a natural resource to them … All we really are is livestock.” Everything climaxes in the TV studio that, with the help of willing earthling collaborators, beams out subliminal propaganda to the clueless earthlings at home.

So in this vein of thinking, the aliens are the Jews, at least as the neo-Nazis perceive them, a parasitical, invasive race of inhuman exploiters, and the collaborators are those literal betes noires of the far right, the “race traitors”. The media, in this reading, is just the “Jew media” of the white right’s fever dreams. Meanwhile, the two-fisted homeless heroes are the racially enlightened battalions of StormFront and their ilk, and the sunglasses represent that common rite of passage for a budding young Brownshirt, the “racial awakening”.

The racial awakening is the white supremacist equivalent of being born again. A shift in perspective, accompanied by a jettisoning of the intolerable shackles of “political correctness”, and suddenly you see everything – history, society, economics, culture – entirely in racial terms, literally in black and white. Somewhere in their attitude to the revelatory sunglasses one detects the whiff of projection.

Let’s allow Carpenter to project his own thoughts. He gave his version after a screening of Halloween at the Hero Complex Film Festival in 2013 – where the neo-Nazi interpretation, apparently then in remission, was not even mentioned. “[They Live] was giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would,” he said. “By the end of the 70s there was a backlash against everything in the 60s, and that’s what the 80s were, and Ronald Reagan became president, and Reaganomics came in … so a lot of the ideals that I grew up with were under assault, and something called a yuppie came into existence, and they just wanted money. And so by the late 80s, I’d had enough, and I decided I had to make a statement, as stupid and banal as it is, but I made one, and that’s They Live.”

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This is in line with what we know of Carpenter’s political attitudes, which on balance veer towards a kind of post-60s left-libertarianism. His best movies arose directly from the suburban ennui of the Eisenhower era he grew up in: atom-bomb drills in school, the Bomb itself, 1950s television, consumerism, mindless conformity. And of course from the movies of the time, which are chock-a-block with reference to invading aliens: The Thing From Another World (which Carpenter would remake in 1982), I Married a Monster from Outer Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers by Don Siegel. That last movie has been dragged back and forth across the political spectrum too. Conservatives say it’s about the mindless conformity imposed by communism, leftwingers that it’s about the mindless conformity imposed by McCarthyism. Siegel wisely let them fight it out among themselves, but then, no one was accusing him – a Jew – of making a secretly antisemitic action movie.

The eye of the beholder rules all in this instance. Unlike the online Klansmen, I don’t see anything Jewish about the invasive aliens or their use of media (you could just as easily argue it foresees Fox News). Instead, I see the Nazi occupation of France or Poland, made all the more frightening by the fact that they don’t even know they’re occupied. However, I did spot the alien-robot politician on TV almost directly quoting – and giving the finger to – Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign slogan: “It’s a new morning in America …” The nightmare Carpenter is trying to awaken from is a rightwing one, the Reagan Invasion. As Carpenter told the LA Weekly recently, “What are you going to do? It’s absolutely foolish.”